Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Spirituality and Philosophy
Levels of Mind
I don’t know how to prove this, but mind that thinks about awareness represents a dimension of mind as different from bare awareness as is the third dimension different from the second dimension. Yet there’s a further step in dimensionality: If mind—awareness—is another dimension, then thinking about thinking is what humans do. So if space […]
Life Enlargement
Life of course is already huge beyond our comprehension, and adding depth is just mind-stretching. However, that is what I am bound to do: articulate in words what I’ve come to know: It is my karma—I think. Also, I enjoy it! Several years ago I did a cartoon playing off of the Peanuts’ cartoon strip, […]
Life’s Spiritual Journey
People are sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously on a sort of journey when it comes to their spiritual orientation to their life. It is unique and very multi-faceted. When I was a kid folks didn’t much think about these things, most folks. You sort of inherited your religion and stayed pretty much with your own kind. […]
Limitedness in Epistemology
I have been lucky enough to encounter a fair number of deep philosophers who consider the way the world is, and I have also developed my notions. Beyond the contents of the notions or myths or theories about which I guarantee you we can never know, there is the problem of epistemology: i.e., how do […]
Lords of the Dance
Well, actually a Lord in the British hierarchy of nobility is not all that high of a status. ("Lord" is how Marquess, Earls and Barons and their sons as well as the sons of Dukes are addressed.) But really I’m referring to third- or other lower order spirits of each dance, as if each dance […]
Low-Grade Mysticism?
As I’ve been contemplating the nature of some more vivid dream images, it occurred to me that I’m experiencing in dream-imagery some aspects of the lower levels of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Semi-mythically speaking, “my” angels—the super-conscious forces, personified, of whatever is “growing” me—have been reminding me increasingly of the seemingly infinite horizons in […]
Lubricating “Grace”
Now there’s been some talk about how I doodle and make things up. I admit to this, but the process is more subtle and complex than it seems. To dismiss it as “just imagination” is as shallow as dismissing, well, imagination, as “just” imagination. What’s this “just” stuff? As if we are entitled to make […]
Make a Splash!
This cartoonist Wiley Miller sometimes expresses wonderful truths. I particularly liked this one. It was a fair description of my life other than a moderate mis-caricatur-ization of my adolescence. Mine was less goth on the surface, more dorky. And the last phase may be age-ist, the cliche of the cane and all. But the joy […]
Making Meaning
I’ve participated in the Network for Personal Meaning, and a recent email from Dr. Wong, who heads up that group reminded me of some thoughts I’ve had about this topic. Personal meaning emerges largely as a feeling, like feeling secure in one’s home. It can also be stifled by a childhood of great insecurity. But […]
Making Meta-Cognition Explicit
One of the trends in the last century—still not apparent to most people, though—is the increasing interest in how we think. It’s an extension of the interest not in the content but the spirit of psychoanalysis. In other words, let’s wonder about the possibility that what is true in astronomy and microbiology is also true […]
Making Stuff Up
I’m afraid I’m profligate—er, no… promiscuous? wrong word. Un, precocious, preternatural, portly? No. I do expressive myself a lot, though, through many channels. Check out my website and especially the section on confabulations. The latest one is relevant to current events, I think. To confabulate is to make stuff up. One then may or may […]
Making/Discovering Meaning
I’ve been associated distantly with the “Network for Personal Meaning,” get their e-mailings, and have been contemplating the place of “meaning” in human life. It recently occurred to me that meaning operates at a mid-higher level of mental organization. Mind operates in layers, just like body operates in levels of function, and that operations on […]
Mandala As Primal Diagram
Circular, vaguely or finely symmetrical drawings that usually show a center and a periphery—such are called “mandalas,” a word used in India. They recognize that certain kinds of art can stimulate meditation. I began drawing mandalas when I was about 30 years old. I was influenced in 1972 by a book titled “Mandalas” by Jose […]
Mandaladoodle
You may have noticed that my drawings and mandalas are less than perfect or professionally painted. This is for several reasons: (1) Ideas come thick and fast, and so I get impatient. (2) I confess to being a little lazy. (3) I want to get this out to you while they’re still fresh in my […]
Mandalas
For the last several years I’ve become especially intrigued with the art form of mandala-making, and especially my own form, which often involves making variations of nine circles in a circle. (See a recent example). This has no intrinsic meaning other than it appeals to me intuitively, but were I to try to put into […]
Mandalas and Sacred Geometry
I just received a card from a friend that had a mandala on it as a design, and that reminded me of this emerging trend to present this form of art for your enjoyment. Thousands of people are exploring this medium and you can find many examples on the internet—especially if you google “mandala.” My […]
March is Bustin’ Out All Over
I checked in with the powers-that-be, and was able to connect with one “Neo-Demetria,” who told me she was an assistant to the archangel in charge of Springtime; in turn, she checked the map and schedule and said, “A-yup, in central Texas Spring started two weeks and four days early, rounding off the hours and […]
Maturity Becoming Obsolete
The very idea of “maturity” as having “grown up enough” is passing. We live in an era of exponential development where, by the time someone has grows up, the world has changed. The maturity involved in being fully “mature” keeps receding, like the horizon. “Maturity” has advanced beyond us, and even the best of us […]
May I Dance With Your Eyes?
This is a trans-dimensional perspective on things. I dare to play, because pure reason backed by evidence is the basis for responsible discourse only at the 6th and lower 7th dimensions. At the upper 7th dimension and certainly above, categories of reason don’t apply. Much is indeed paradoxical. Let me explain: Most humans experience a […]
Meaning as Vital-Mind-M
I’ve been thinking of the need for a sense of meaning in life, becoming more intensely aware of the need for this to be operating at a certain level. It occurs to me that feeling that life is meaningful is a kind of psycho-cultural nutrient, a kind of vitamin-equivalent that I call a “Vital-Mind” component. […]
Meaning-Making
We all make meaning as instinctively and intuitively and largely unconsciously, just as we generate the illusion of a self and other illusions, such as reality being out there (objective) rather than in-here (subjective). The unconscious mind is unbelievably fast and powerful—this Freud got right, Groddek even more so, and contemporary psychologists, while disagreeing with […]
Meta-Existence
In a recent Discover magazine there’s a small article and visualization titled “When Black Holes Collide, which illustrates in 3 dimensions (plus color—which adds another type of dimension) “how black holes stretch and bend the fabric of space-time.” Now this concept of stretching or bending space-time is inconceivable—Dr. (Kip) Thorne says that “The human mind […]
Meta-Reality
Zordak, my little green man in a flying saucer who visits me— you don’t have to believe this—said to me, “You keep noodging me to explain and I can’t explain in human terms. So I made this diagram:” You understand, this involves multiple dimensions converging, among many other meanings. If you relax your mind you […]
Metaphors for Divinity
Zordak: You were wondering about how other beings in other parts of this or related universes think about God. You might anticipate that there are innumerable versions. I admit, though, that the notion of God being sort of like an earthly king sitting on a throne issuing commandments as such people did during only a […]
Metaphysical Cartooning
(Or cartooned intuitive metaphysics.) I are a sy-kie-a-trist! Well, I was! A Board Certified hunky-do! I’ve given psychiatry up now and am focusing on writing a book that expressed my intuitions about metaphysics, but it’s illustrated by cartoons. Really (consciously), I just made this stuff up, but it hangs together more as time goes on. […]